The Gathering: Mormon Pioneers on the Trail to Zion By Maurine Jensen Proctor, Scot Facer Proctor Deseret Book, 1996. 226 pages. ISBN: 1-57345-087-1 Suggested retail price: $49.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Richard B. Johnson

I have never begun a review with a personal odyssey story, but in this case, I feel that I must. I volunteered for a review early in the spring because I knew I would have some spare time to do a review during the summer. Benson has said to expect our books soon and to get them back within thirty days. No book arrived during summer. When I finally received the book, in the fall, school had started and I was deep into projects that included a full rewrite of the university curriculum in preparation for a shift from the quarter system to the semester system. (No, I don't have to do it all, but I am suddenly on four new committees that meet weekly, all of them waiting impatiently for some dumb report I have written in the mean time). The time press has converted me from a contributor to a lurker on the list.

When I opened the package, I found a coffee table book. I wouldn't want to put down coffee table books, I own several, mostly about Unicorns, Dragons and Angels, and when my children were younger and when Was more faithful about family home evenings, some of our evenings were taken up sitting in a circle as daddy or mommy turned the pages of a coffee table book, but I had never thought about reviewing a coffee table book.

It isn't that reviews are unfamiliar to me. I have written reviews for professional books, novels, short stories, journal articles, and more than a hundred plays (both scripts and performances). I even supplemented my family income at one time by doing oral book reviews for women's literary societies (which really dates me to people who remember when that phenomenon was popular), but I realized, when I removed this book from its cover, that I didn't have the vaguest idea how to critique a "coffee table book". What is most important, the photography, the text, what? My immediate reaction was to place it in the appropriate place (the coffee table -- should those be herbal tea tables, or soft drink tables in good Mormon homes?). Once or twice a day I would walk by it -- primarily to reinforce some good Mormon guilt, reminding myself that soon Benson would be tapping his toe wondering when I was going to get at it. (I had been foolish enough to let him know when the book finally arrived, so that I couldn't just assume that he wouldn't know it had come.)

Finally, I sat down on the loveseat by the "coffee table" and determined to read the darn thing through. I did it. It was a remarkably painless experience. The pictures were pretty. Some of them seemed a little anachronistic: I wasn't sure what a pile of newly cut oak trees told me about Council Bluffs, or another row of felled oak trees said about Locust Grove, in fact I became aware gradually that the authors really liked oak trees and that many of the pictures were either of, or framed by, oak trees. As I read the historical text, I was caught by the very personal nature of much of the narrative, but the thought occurred that as church history, it sure wasn't Leonard Arrington. The only really enduring sensation of that first reading as a sense of "tone" in the language. It is difficult to define, but as I read the text, I heard it in my mind as if it were read aloud by Richard L. Evans or Charlton Heston, or Michael Rennie (the voice of Peter and of Christ in many 1940's and 50's biblical movies). I felt like I had heard the text as much as read it, a quite remarkable sensation.

I still had no idea how to write about this, or even if I really wanted to be affirmative or negative. I began to get an involuntary feel for my own opinions when I rode with my son to Orlando where he spent his time auditioning for Jeopardy and I spent mine doing some temple sessions followed by a prowl through the Orlando LDS Bookstore. On my prowl, I found myself looking for The Gathering. Not finding a copy, I mentioned it to the lady behind the counter, who felt sure that they had some. She went out into the stacks with me and on a "coffee table" in the front of the store she found three copies, covered up by some other Mormon coffee table books. She looked at me expectantly and I blushed, realizing that I had put her out to find a fifty dollar book that I didn't want to buy because I already had a free copy. I then talked her into a more attractive display with the book standing, open. She probably thought I was one of the Proctors, especially because, by the time I left the store I had sold two of the visible copies to people who probably had come into the story looking for "Leonard Arrington" books. As I listened to my own sales pitch to these poor souls who didn't know, when they came into the store, that the answer to all their needs would be a coffee table book about the trek of saints from England to Utah, I realized that I really liked the book.

When I got home I decided to get right at this review and ran into another problem; one of habit. If you could see copies of things I have reviewed in the past you would see that they look disgusting. I use highliters (in the old days it was colored pencils), marking passages that I wish to quote affirmatively with blue, "more analysis" is marked yellow (becoming green if they ever get the blue mark) and Pink is yukky. I also fold over pages, insert multiple book marks torn from yellow legal pads clipped in with paper clips, etc. I sat down with my tools, looked at this book and said to my self in Richard L. Evens tones. "I'm not going to mess up this book, not unless they are going to send me another when I am through, and I don't consider that likely.

I Xeroxed some pages that I could mark appropriately and proceeded to toil through a somewhat stiffly written generally favorable review of the book, noting a little about each of the six segments taking us from the Apostolic callings in America to the missions of Wilford Woodruff and Dan Jones in Great Britain, the arrival of British Saints a Nauvoo and the travel by wagon and handcart to the west. I particularly enjoyed vignettes, many of them already familiar, taken from the journals and lives of the saints of the time.

I came to the office this morning determined to send off this review as soon as my classes were finished for the day. As I loaded my mailer program to send this away, messages began to come in, and one of the first was the Deseret Book Company publicity release for the book. As I read the two side by side I knew that I couldn't send the first review. In some ways they were too similar, yet didn't say enough (although the PR release is mostly verbatim from the inside cover of the book-the use of which was an idea that had come to me in my early dealings with the book) The final stop on my odyssey has been to spend two hours scrapping and rewriting what had been done before. By the way, the press release brought to my attention a fact that I missed in reading the dust cover, that Maureen Jensen Proctor had been a writer for The Spoken Word a fact that could explain the sense of "tone" that I mentioned earlier.

Here it is, I recommend the book, I am glad I have it, I have even learned to love the oak trees. I look forward to reviewing another book, in a less hectic quarter (and hope it is not a "coffee-, punch-, herbal tea-table" book.

Richard B. Johnson

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Facts are nothing without context.  Perception is everything
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